In chronicling the horrific 26-year life of the film’s simian star, Nim Chimpsky, Oscar-winning director James Marsh (“Man on Wire”) makes it hard not to analogize with the Holocaust, particularly when baby Nim is literally ripped from his mother’s clinging arms and shipped off to New York City to be part of a Columbia University experiment in which he was to be raised like a human.

Al Alexander

Most agree that the Holocaust is a benchmark in the evil that men do. People rustled from their homes, rounded up and placed in cages. Children separated from their parents and subjected to “medical experiments.” Trusting souls tricked into entering the venue of their demise.

Rightfully, whenever we hear of those dark times, we’re horrified and aghast. But when the same thing happens to man’s closest relative, the chimpanzee, we’re far less empathetic. “They’re just animals,” most say. But the deeply disturbing “Project Nim” just might make you think otherwise.

In chronicling the horrific 26-year life of the film’s simian star, Nim Chimpsky, Oscar-winning director James Marsh (“Man on Wire”) makes it hard not to analogize with the Holocaust, particularly when baby Nim is literally ripped from his mother’s clinging arms and shipped off to New York City to be part of a Columbia University experiment in which he was to be raised like a human.

The goal was to prove that chimps would, excuse the expression, ape the developmental stages of normal children, including everything from bonding with the mother figure to toilet training to learning to communicate via sign language. It worked, of course, but the thing none of the geniuses at Columbia considered was Nim’s animal instincts. They apparently just assumed that they would be suppressed by his human upbringing. But they weren’t. Just ask the lab assistant whose face was nearly ripped off by Nim’s powerful hands.

This, shockingly, is the happy time of Nim’s life, but his increasingly violent and unpredictable behavior got him expelled from Columbia and shipped off on a dark and lonely journey into a world in which he no longer wore pants, dined on people food or had a circle of human friends willing to play games at his beckon. He was caged, alone and had no idea how to behave with his fellow chimps, which might as well have been tigers or goats as far as Nim was concerned. He hadn’t seen another chimp since he was a few weeks old.

In the film’s reams of archival footage, you can see the feelings of betrayal in Nim’s eyes, as his “family” at Columbia injects him full of tranquilizers and flies him off to a research center in Oklahoma, where he’s left to fend for himself in a cold, sterile cage. And as one of the film’s bevy of unsavory humans tells us, “once you put a chimp in a cage, it’s all downhill.”

It’s at that point that “Project Nim” ceases being cute and fascinating and becomes dark and unsettling. And in the ensuing years, as Nim is passed from owner to owner back and forth across the nation, your heart sinks as fast as your ire boils. And if there’s one thing Marsh knows, it’s how to reach your deepest emotions. He did it with “Man on Wire,” and he does it again here.

The only hero in all this, besides Nim, is Bob Ingersoll, a young psychology student who took Nim under his wing when the chimp was in Oklahoma. They became fast friends, and we see why in home movies of Bob and the chimp doing what Nim liked to do best: play. We also see photos of Nim sipping liquor and toking on a doobie (no doubt supplied by Bob, an avid Grateful Dead fan).

I’m sure it’s frowned upon by veterinarians, but seeing Nim getting high and acting goofy makes him seem all the more human. And the more human he becomes, the more attached you grow until it becomes almost unbearable to watch each cruel indignity befall him.

His “well-meaning” enemies are numerous, but the biggest villain of the piece is Columbia behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace, a short, nerdy-looking intellectual with a laughable comb-over and a Dr. Mengele-Angel-of-Death-type of disposition.

He is the one who had Nim yanked from his mother and relocated to a brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Nim spent his early years as a member of a large, upwardly mobile hippie family that fed him, changed him and instructed him in an ever-expanding vocabulary.

We meet Nim’s new “mother,” Stephanie LeFarge, and one of her daughters, Jenny Lee, both of whom offer a host of humorous recollections about baby Nim, including how the former used to breast-feed the ape. Then, the other shoe begins to fall, as you learn that the relationship between Stephanie and Terrace was anything but professional. It’s the first of many hints subtly dropped by Marsh that the good doctor wasn’t so nice. It gets worse when we learn that the doc’s new squeeze is a pretty, 19-year-old lab assistant, who will eventually become Nim’s third “mother,” shacking up with the ape on a palatial country estate owned by the university.

It’s about then that you start thinking of Herb as the kind of guy Hitler would have welcomed in his ranks. True, Herb never killed anyone or did anything illegal, but his lack of empathy for Nim somehow seems worse than any crime. You detest him even more than Dr. James Mahoney, the guy running the medical research center that later buys Nim with plans to infect him with AIDS and/or hepatitis – all in the name of science.

That’s when the tears flow and the comparisons to concentration camps reach their zenith. Marsh adds to the simmering emotions by effectively putting you so deep inside Nim’s head you viscerally sense his confusion and loneliness. It shakes you deeply, too.

I’ll even go so far to say that the final 30 minutes of this riveting documentary will make you ashamed to be part of the human race, a species so wrapped up in its quest to learn and discover that it doesn’t care who it hurts as long as the ends justify the means.

Suddenly, “Project Nim” seems less a story about a chimp and more of a story about us. And let me tell you, the reflection in the mirror Marsh props up is pretty darn ugly. Not to mention shameful.

Al Alexander may be reached at aalexander@ledger.com.

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